January 5, 2010, Torah from the Inside, Dr. Mishory, Parsha Shemote
In the book of Shemote, people from a family multiply and evoke a reaction from the Egyptian aristocracy. The Egyptian nobility is afraid of military defeat, damage to the empire, etc. This is a macrocosm. Pharaoh is going to rectify this. Then enter two women who do not even have real names. This story is not influential to the outcome. They do not foil the plot; Pharaoh just changes strategy a bit. The purpose of the story is that G*d rewarded them. The great great great granddaughter of Miriam married into the family of King David and became part of the Meshiach line. The reward was in Olam Habbah and in this world.
What is the significance of the way that Moshe was born?
On Tisha bâAv we read the Talmud story of the Titus, of the time he was still general and was storming the Bais HaMigdash. He ripped the curtain of the Holy of Holies and blood came out. Titus proclaimed that he had killed the G*d of the Jews. A heavenly voice said: you have twice ground flour. Flour ground a second time, although a finer product, is essentially the same. Nothing really has changed; you have refined what was already done. The Bais HaMigdash had already been destroyed in Olam Haba. This could have been said to Pharaoh. Despite all of the babies he killed, mostly Hebrew but also Egyptian, Moshe was born exactly when his birth had been predicted.
Titus left Jerusalem as emperor on a boat and found himself in a severe storm. He decided that he had only wounded the Hebrew G*d, and like other gentiles, believed that the Hebrew G*d had a lot of power in the water. He challenged HaShem: You save the people in the water! Fight fair on dry land! Immediately the waters calmed down. When the ship docked safely in Italy, he set off on foot, and an insect went up his nose and lodged in his brain, in the same place as people would get frontal lobotomies. The insect ate his brain and also made a distracting noise. When he went past a blacksmith, the pounding of the hammer and anvil made the noise of the insect stop, so he had smiths come to the palace and pound away to keep his brain quiet. He paid the gentile blacksmiths, but he did not pay the Hebrew blacksmiths because, as he told them, their payment was their enjoyment of witnessing his torment. An autopsy showed that his brain was eaten away.
Batya, the daughter of Pharaoh, became a Hebrew, and Pharaoh ended up feeding and clothing the savior of the Jews in his household.
Moshe is sort of a bal teshuva. One version is that he was out seeking his Jewish roots when he came across the Egyptian beating a Hebrew slave, and he killed him.
We do not have the kind of vanity that Pharaoh had because we have all had our share of hard knocks. With that kind of vanity, he indulged his daughter, never believing that the baby could be a threat to him.
The Gemara speaks of change of plural to singular in the Shemah. The first paragraph is singular and the second paragraph switches back and forth. He is going to harvest and have good things. Then it goes back to plural. What is the focus of the attention of G*d in the world? The Jews or the unique individual? That the people nest the righteous individual or the individual shapes the nation? Shimon Bar Yochai or Yishmael? Shimon Bar Yochai burns the field and says that the community does the work for the person on a spiritual journey. Slomoner Rebbe adopted 100 children in a New York apartment. How these people made money was of secondary importance. One rebbe, Avigdor Miller, refused a raise.
Moshe named his son Gershome, a stranger in a desolate place. Moshe does not want to offend the host culture, so the name is ambiguous and could be translated I Was A Stranger There.
After 30 years Moshe still considered himself a GERE, even though he was married to the eldest daughter of a prominent family. He says: I was a stranger, but he really means I Am A Stranger In A Foreign Land.
We go from Moshe to Bnai Yisrael. Was Moshe in the service of the community or vice versa? We think that a tzadik is serving us and we are benefiting. But how does a tzadik grow? It is our questions that develop him. We are both the tzadik and the group when we interact with people.
Why do the Hebrew slaves cry when Pharaoh dies? Some of the sages say that they have both a hope and a fear of the new Pharaoh, but no new king is mentioned yet. They are reasoning that they are going through a bad time and are the scapegoats, but Pharaoh could change his mind and return things to the way they were before. But the new pharaoh will view the Hebrew slaves as the natural order, institutionalized slavery.
Maam moilaze Torah anthology translated by Rabbi Arieh Kaplan, the best of Jewish scholarship. They cried out as in a scream. We say the Amidah silently because we do not want people to think that we have to scream to be heard. But when we are in pain, we show our true feelings and we cry out. Avawkham: beseeching prayer.
How many people were praying at that time? Probably only a few unique individuals. The activator was the avoda, slavery. We have a wrong idea of difficulties. We pray because we have troubles and G*d answers our prayer. If that were so, we could ask G*d to skip the problems and we would have no problems. We are given the problems so we will pray. Troubles are the seed of the redemption. The seed must be buried, disintegrated, rot, turn into nothingness, merge, and then emerge. It is a harrowing process. Can we even tell where the death of the seed turns into the tree? Does redemption begin at the prayer, the death of Pharaoh, many years of pain? It began when Yosef came to Mitzrayim.
Moshe is being prepared at the same time as the people are being prepared. In our lives we do not know where our tests will lead us and it will influence a lot of people. Will we be the people who pray or the people who cry out?
When all hope is lost. In this sentence G*d is Elokim, the Power Source.
G*d hears, remembers, sees, knows. We are not worthy but there was a covenant. Hearing triggers memory, but G*d does not forget. It brings it to the forefront, brings it into focus, awakened for something more to happen, activation of the covenant. When we pray, we know we are not worthy, but when we cry out we do not know we are unworthy. We remember the covenant.
G*d saw and He knew. He knows the truth in every single cry.
There are different kinds of knowing.
CHACHMAH: wisdom, vast oceans above, heavens, waters above.
BINAH: in between, we process chuchmah.
DAAS: awareness, the product of binah, knowledge, we own it.
Moshe takes the sheep to the wilderness and to the mountain of G*d, Horev. Later he does the same thing with the Children of Israel. Lest we think that anything about our recognizing Torah was after going out of Egypt. Everything is prepared. The cure comes before the illness.
Bamidbar is a grassy wasteland, not a desert. It took 40 days to get there and there was nothing to eat. There appeared an angel of HaShem, not Elokim. The flame is burning a thorn bush. G*d will appear in the humble places. We are not too humble for the Shechinah to be interested in us. Also, if we accept the fire/passion from G*d, He will not be consumed. This is not true about any other relationship.
From Rabbi Nussbaum: Mattisyahu, the Meskiach of the Lakewood yeshiva, got up in front of 1,000 people and said that Reb Aaron Cutler appeared to him in a dream and said that if he would agree to stay as Meskiash of the yeshiva until Meshiach comes, his wife, who had suffered a severe heart attack, would be healed. His wife had a miraculous recovery. He is in his 70s or 80s.
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Mordechai Mishory's class on reading and translating the parsha with commentary. If you have any questions or comments about the class, contact Mordechai Mishory at MMISHORY@COMCAST.NET. Dr. Mishory is a psychotherapist, teacher, and spiritual life coach in Denver, Colorado.
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